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I was re-watching Iron Man recently and noticed something interesting. During Iron Man’s first “boot up sequence”, in the “terrorist” caves of Nowhereistan, some butchered C code is displayed on a faked up laptop screen.

The code displayed on screen, although missing some syntactically important characters such as semi-colons, is actual valid C source code. So valid in fact that I wondered where it came from.

The code above comes from a firmware downloader for the RCX (a programmable, microcontroller-based Lego brick), written in 1998 at Stanford University by Kekoa Proudfoot. You can get the full source file here and it is distributed under the Mozilla Public License. This is the same license used by Firefox and many other Open Source software products.

The sequence in the film in which this code appears suggests that the code is either being downloaded as firmware to the Iron Man suit or being used to upload firmware to an RCX Lego brick that is somehow involved in the operation of Iron Man.

So it appears that Iron Man is either powered by Open Source software or made of Lego. I’m not sure which is cooler.

How do I update controls on my UI thread from the Asyncronous Delegate? I understand it’s not safe to just try to update it directly from the asynchronous thread, but I need to figure out how to update it somehow. Specifically I need to increment a ProgressBar and update text in a Label.

Thanks,
Michael C.

Response:

My name is Tyrone Hernandez. I grew up on the streets, so I’m familiar with this kind of shiznit. I am down with this, and I’m going to keep it real by top-posting.

In my hood, I have a homie named Shaniqua and some times she calls me on the phone in an asynchronous fashion. Now I’m hip to her jive, so I don’t wanna just hang up. If I feels like talkin to Shaniqua, I talk to her. If not, I use my power of “Control” to check “IsInvokeRequired” and if it is, I call Control.BeginInvoke() to upgrade my progress bar.

Well, I’d be likin’ to talk more, but my crack dealer is here so I’m going to call some of his methods. Peace out!

I received an actual bona fide snail mail chain letter today. It even came with 5 cents taped to the top of it.

I have no idea who sent it to me. I didn’t recognize any of the 5 names printed in the letter. I imagine that it was some someone, now quite literally, 5 cents short of a dollar. Probably someone I sold something to on eBay. I doubt anyone I know in real life would be foolish enough to send me such a thing.

After marveling in bewilderment at the utter hilarity of the idea for a moment, I pocketing the 5 cents and tossed the letter. At least I can say I did make some money off the pyramid scheme. Perhaps not the millions promised. But every little bit helps. 🙂